Adobe Captivate 5 Course

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Adobe Captivate 5 is an industry standard software simulation program that produces Flash-based files for easy and rapid deployment for users to view. In this VTC course, instructor Mark Struthers walks you through the creation and subsequent production of a literature based information project focused on 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens. Mark covers workspaces to widgets and everything in between so that a resulting SWF or EXE file can be created. Work files are included. Click the movie links below to get started today!

Hello, and welcome to this VTC course on Adobe's Captivate 5. I imagine if you'rehere watching with fevered anticipation what will subsequently roll out in thiscomprehensive course, then you'll know at least a little about Captivate. Now Isay this because it's not one of Adobe's high profile programs like Photoshopor Illustrator or Flash. Captivate is a more esoteric program in many ways, butit's a program that, excuse the pun, captivated me around six, maybe sevenyears ago in its original Macromedia incarnation when called RoboDemo. In fact,it was originally called RoboDemo when the program was bought from a smallcompany called EHelp and Adobe, from there, saw its potential and took it fromstrength to strength until what you see in front of you now, Captivate 5. Now,just going back a little, in this first RoboDemo incarnation I first wet myfeet in the pool of software training and as a freelance software author Iproduced a couple of training courses on Celemony's Melodyne and Steinberg'sWaveLab. In fact, the WaveLab course was picked up by Steinberg's distributorat that time and, as far as I know, still lives on the product range from thecompany that bought it. Since then, VTC have released a new WaveLab 6 course Iauthored and, hopefully, a soon to be released WaveLab 7 course now that it'sjust got released, in fact yesterday at the time of authoring this trainingtutorial. Anyway, enough about my credentials - back to Captivate history -RoboDemo quickly became rebranded as Captivate and from that point has becomean extremely useful program that allows, amongst other things, softwaretraining in a different way to similar screen capture programs such asCamtasia. Now I know that sounds a little bit confusing when I say createsoftware tutorials in a different way to traditional screen capture programs.I'm not saying Captivate is superior to Camtasia, I just say it's different. Ilove them both. And as this course unfolds I hope to show you how Captivatediffers to the competition. Speaking of unfolding courses, let me say what willbe included in this course. As I said earlier, Captivate isn't one of Adobe'shighest profile programs but, that said, it does share the common Adobeinterface - not exactly, but if you're familiar with any of Adobe's programs,and who doesn't know Photoshop or Flash or Dreamweaver, then you'll not need tofeel intimidated by Captivate's User Interface with its panel and tabstructure. Anyway, back to what we'll feature in this course. Well, I'll walkyou around the interface so you know what's available to use and where thefunctions are situated. As I've just said, it's not too dissimilar to all theother Adobe programs released to date. However, I am aware that some usersdon't know Adobe programs at all, so we will need to spend a little bit of timelooking around the User Interface. I want to look at the individual panels in afair bit of detail so that you can see how they link together, and we'llconsider how to set up a Captivate presentation and how these presentationsare, for the most part, built up from multiple slides, and slides are justcontainers for specific actions to occur before progressing to the next slide.We'll look at Captivate's integration with other Adobe programs and even withMicrosoft's PowerPoint. Incidentally, if you do use PowerPoint then you'll havea jump start in terms of how projects fit together in relation to slides. We'llalso look at adding assets, or objects to our presentations, and the widevariety of importable properties we can include. And, as the course progresses,we'll consider the implementation of integrated captions as a method ofproviding further information to narration as you're Captivate project unfolds.Now, one of the ways Captivate differs to screen capture programs such as Camtasiaor Hypercam is in how we can include interactivity in Captivate, so that willtake up some of our time, too. Now, just to clarify, Camtasia does allow userinteractivity but not in the same way as Captivate does. Of course, we'll needto look at outputting our projects into formats easily available to use. I'mtalking about converting our projects into complete playback experiences. Alongthe way we'll discover the outcome isn't necessarily a fluid movie that playsback in a linear fashion as this introduction tutorial is doing here. What weget with Captivate is the opportunity to play our presentation but periodicallypause itself as it requires user integration or input before progressing to thenext section. Additionally, Captivate allows the user to jump from one sectionto another while skipping certain, perhaps irrelevant areas. We'll look intothis as we focus on branching as the course progresses. OK, so I feel that'san introduction for you about what Captivate does, a little bit about itshistory, and the sort of projects that you can create. Right? Let's move on nowI've captivated your attention - terrible pun. Sorry. I'll try my best not toinclude too many of those, although I can't help myself sometimes. OK, let'smove on. I'll see you in the next tutorial.